The report presents this narrative with remarkable specificity: It describes in detail how GRU officers installed malware, leased U.S.-based computers, and used cryptocurrencies to carry out their hacking operation. The intelligence that caught the GRU hackers is portrayed as so invasive and precise that it even captured the keystrokes of individual Russian officers, including their use of search engines.

The VIPS experiments involved transfers of data from this side of the Atlantic to the other side of the Atlantic. There is no telling how many hops it required to make the trip. On the other hand, if the downloaders of the data used a receiving computer that was close to the DNC’s computer, then the number of hops could have been minimized. Thus the transfer speed could have been higher than the transfer speed from a computer on this side of the Atlantic to some place in Europe that the VIPS experimented with.

This is exactly the scenario of a leased, rented, or computer time purchase of a computer local to the DNC.